LG Awarded Patent Design For Flexible Smartphone/Wristband Device

LG has been known as one of the bigger technology manufacturers that has been interested in the development of curved screens for use with mobile technology and devices, alongside Samsung. LG's development and production of the devices like the LG G Flex and the LG G Flex 2 show that they're willing to produce something that is a little different than what we're used to seeing, but a new patent design that LG was just awarded is much more in the realm of experimental than even the G Flex was before it hit store shelves back when it was getting ready to launch.

The new patent design, listed as patent D726,140 shows a design for a hybrid device that would meld together both a watch or cuff/wristband with an actual smartphone like device that bends and curves around the wrist with the cuff. This would give the wearer the ability to more or less turn their smartphone into a smartwatch of sorts, albeit with a much larger screen than all other smartwatches on the market. At the moment this is just a patent design that LG was looking to secure, and it's very possible that it will never make it to development or production stages, but should LG actually choose to pursue development, they'll now have the patent rights to do so.

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Since this is just a tentative design for the time being, there are no details about what sort of specifications a device like this would have, but it's clear that LG would intend for this to be a full fledged smartphone device with a front and rear-facing camera and presumably all the other standard features on devices these days. With the phone bending around the band all the other hardware components would also have to be flexible to move along with the device itself, and we'd have to wonder just exactly what type of material LG would use to make the outer body of the device. In one of the figures, LG shows a perspective of the phone display that has been turned to a 90 degree angle(counter clockwise according to the patent description) so the viewer could presumably see things in landscape mode, which would make it possible to view things in a wider format without having to take it off the wrist and hold it. Imagine watching videos with a device like this on your wrist.